Ugh! Now what?! We need to change a setting on MySQL that ships with MAMP. As it turns out, the default max_allowed_packet is set to 1M and it needs to be higher. Changing that to 100M did the trick for me. Locate your my.cnf file and add the following setting under the [mysqld] section:

The Problem

OSX is fairly secure, however, nothing is impervious to attacks, and following the weakest link theory, the whole system will be as secure as its least secure component. In the recent events relating to the flashback malware, that component is NOT OSX itself, but rather, Java, as this article points out.

The Problem

You, like me once, just upgraded to Xcode 4 and now you can't compile blender... This happens because the blender compiler (BTW: I use scons to compile) uses the old sdk 10.5 and/or 10.4u, which is not available on Xcode 4.

If you need help getting the initial setup to compile blender, view this video done by the awesome people at blender cookie.